Promotional Principles for Creative People
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We (Metalabel) are making this guide to reflect what we’ve learned about releasing and promoting work. The good and the bad.

We’re sharing this guide while it’s still in progress because our perspective is just one voice. There’s also yours. We want to reflect different points of view in the finished version of this guide.

In this work-in-progress doc, we’ve left comments on (see?) so that you can add your experiences and reactions. We’ve also made this chill five-question survey about how you feel about promoting your work that this will draw from as well.

Later this summer we’ll publish a version of what you see below mixed with what you have to say. Everyone whose perspective is included will be invited as a collaborator and be on the split if we ever choose to make the work available to purchase.

<3 Metalabel

We love creatingto create but dislike ~~hate~~ publishingto publish.

Making something new is all experimentation and possibility and exploration. Super yes to every step of that.

Publishing means promoting which means venturing into the market to show our wares. An entirely different experience.

We all release work with hopes that other people will like orand even want to purchase it. That generally does not happen without some push from us, which comes more naturally to some than others.

How do we do this?

Here we give a guide of sorts. To carecaring or not carecaring. A menu of options that may or may not feel right to you. Nothing matters more than staying true to your voice. We hope this guide helps you do that.

01 Do it for yourself

It’s easy to base our feelings about our work on what others think.

It’s normal to feel discouraged and question ourselves when things don’t turn out the way we wanted them to.

It’s important to make work you want to see out in the world. Nbecause you want it, not because of where you hope it’ll get you, and certainly not because it’s what you see someone else doing. Your work should be work that you are inspired to make.

Doing it for yourself takes courage. It means not obsessing over outside voices. It means staying true to what youwe believe even when it’s out of step with what’s popular. This is hard but rewarding.

When it comes to promotion, doing it for yourself can take you in very different directions, depending on what you’re comfortable with.

Because you’re doing it for yourself you could be someone who goes the extra mile, taps into your entrepreneurial energy, and does everything possible to create opportunities for your work to be seen. Some of us are just wired this way.

It can also be true that because you’re doing it for yourself, you don’t want to promote at all because it feels out of spirit with your practice. We know what it’s like to create from a deep place. That’s the kind of thing we all tend to be sensitive to.

Both camps benefit from one piece of advice: liberate yourself from caring about immediate responses to your work. Liberate yourself from needing things to sell out. Liberate your judgment of your work from its commercial or social response.

Do not give a f*!k about how many people like it.

No matter how many people like your work, it will never feel like enough if that’s the reason you’re making it. You’ll see someone else with a bigger audience and feel inadequate again. It’s a never-ending spiral.

This does not mean you should be casual or careless. You can not give a f*!k about what other people think and still take care in every element because it’s your standard for your work.

Be serious and obsessive about the things that feel right to you because they feel right to you.

Give yourself freedom. Don’t give yourself the pressure of needing to deliver creatively and hit some metric. Creating to please a potential audience can be torture. Create because you want to. When we make work because we care about it, we’re infinitely more likely to find a fruitful path.

02 Small is beautiful

Dominant, commercial language ~~world~~ says GO BIG. MAXIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, AMPLIFY, WIN. Get ahead. Self-promote. Don’t self-reflect.

This is the world filtered through marketing and social media. The water we swim in.

For some people this message clicks. For others, the ego-thumping couldn’t feel more foreign.

Some of us don’t want to go viral. We just want to make things we like and have our own idea of what success looks like for weourselves.

This is easier said than done. Much of the internet’s pressure comes from the visible, open-ended metrics that surround us. Because a post gotwas liked X many likes times, we see it as more valuable than something we did that gotwith l was lessess. How we rank next to our peers is right there in black and white.

This is where we get into trouble. We drag ourselves down. Their thing is so much better than our thing. We doubt our voice.

Can this be avoided?

One counterintuitive way is by releasing work that’s more limited. By setting the ceiling for how much interest we’re looking for, we define our success. It’s not about did you get X many likes, it’s simply saying are there 25, 50, or 100 people out there that really care about what I’m doing and will take a chance on something I want to share?

Limited releases shape success in a way that can be meaningful to others, too. When the audience is intimate and it means something to be there, magic can happen.

This is a key step towards inner creative liberation. We can let go of the idea of being everything for everybody. Free ourselves from the burden of pleasing an imagined audience. Empower ourselves to make work that we think matters and craft it in a way that it meaningfully matters to others too.

Embrace the liberation of small.

03 Celebrate the night before

Our friends at MSCHF once shared a fascinating anecdote: they always have release parties for their drops the night before. They want to celebrate making the work rather than how the work is received.

There’s a lot of wisdom in this. First, it’s common for our hoped-for release day dreams to outpace reality. Outsized expectations can cause us to misjudge success as failure. Release day hangovers are real and unfair to ourselves.

Second, celebrating the night before reinforces making the work as the act to be celebrated. As it should be. That’s the one part that’s under our control. It’s the process that you as the artist or we as the small team went through that’s deserving of celebration, regardless of what other people think about it.

Learn from MSCHF. Celebrate the night before. Separate the market expectations we carry about a work from the creative effort of producing the work itself.

04 Context is queen

In an age where we’re swampeding with content, it is’s context that makes certain things stand out. When we know who it’s from. When we know why it exists. When we get a sense of a deeper world it connects to. These are all experiences that draw people closer to our work.

For some creative work — not all — a way in is the why that inspired it to happen. Some deeper narrative that drives it. These are important things to share in ways that are true to our voice and who we are.

Process can also be a rich area for framing and giving context around a piece. Because the work was made in a certain way, or involved these specific people, it will gain a greater sense of aura and curiosity.

We can take this even farther and build a world that our work comes from. Worldbuilding is a form of creative resilience — a way to strengthen our point of view and give ourselves license to create with freedom. Our work can be a sneak peek into a hidden universe that audiences are invited to discover. and our work reflects.

When people glimpse what drives our work they feel more connected and empathetic to it. They think of it as their discovery, something they feel warm and proud for being a part of. Facilitate that deeper story of meaning by sharing the why and the context behind your work.

05 Release windowing

There’s an adage in marketing that it takes three impressions for someone to act on a piece of messaging. We don’t want to treat our work like a product that needs to be advertised, but there are lessons we can drawtake from this: chiefly that it takes more than one exposure to convince someone.for someone to be convinced.

If we take this insight a step farther, we can see that for most projects the right goal isn’t to make the biggest splash, it’s to stay in the cultural eye for as long as possible. The longer your work is cycling through social media, culture, and in people’s minds, the greater your chances of being seen and growing your audience.

The classic strategy for this is “Release Windowing,” or designing an elongated campaign around your release that will give people a reason to keep paying attention.

Think of the way movies have pre-release hype, then a big release day, then later pop up again on streaming services and other formats. That’s a Release Windowing strategy developed by the film industry to maintain mindshare for their projects. Same with hardcover and softcover books.

The same concept applies with releases on the internet — if we wish. (Keep in mind, not giving a f#!k is advised.)

Thinking in terms of a Release Window would say don’t think about your release as just the day it comes out, but the preceding ten days and the ten days following — ripe periods of time to build anticipation and a deeper story about your work.

You can do this by holding back on releasing certain information or media until the right moment, or scheduling specific events to happen in the days before or after your release. The goal is to use this space to establish the context of your work and build anticipation and understanding of it in your public’s eyes.

Release Windows can also be helpful because they cr

eate a sense of internal pacing for you, the promoter. It’s easy to getbe sucked into a frantic energy in the early days and push out too much too quickly because we fear things aren’t going as well as we hoped. By setting a schedule and strategy ahead of time, we can pace ourselves and express our work thoughtfully and at a rhythm that’s more likely to be felt.

06 Be prepared for release day

Very basic, but it’s a good idea to have a plan for what’s going to happen on the day you release.

These plans include having a post ready to go out on the platforms where you’re most active orto writing a personal essay or newsletter about why the piece exists. If you wish to care about these things – and again, you truly are at liberty not to — you can tailor your message to the platform to make sure it’s more likely to be shared.

This can also mean building anticipation around the date ahead of time. This is constant in the worlds of music and film, where release dates hold a lot of cache for the true believers. You can experiment with doing the same around your work too.

In our experience, release days are also prone to be times of constant refreshing in search of the dopamine hits of stats updates and notifications. It leads to what we think of as “slot machine eyes,” where we constantly look for affirmation and experience no joy or emotion of any kind no matter what happens. All we want is more.

Anticipating this, we’ve learned to schedule our posts and time away from our keyboard when we put out new work. Rather than get lost in that initial frantic burst, we give ourselves athe gift of a couple of hours with a friend or outside away from a screen, then come back later to see how things have gone.

07 Release in different mediums

Consider the power of the music video — taking work that had existed in one medium and breaking it into another, creating a new type of audience and cultural relationship.

This transformation is something that’s possible with all work. We can experiment with releasing and conjugating our work into other mediums and formats.

I wrote a book five years ago and made a point of expressing the book as a website, a deeper community, a video, and through countless podcasts and events. All of these were expressions of the work intended to put it in front of audiences who would be open to it if I expressed it in forms that they were already consuming.

There’s a danger here, where you find yourself doing nothing but conjugating your work into different social media structures. That’s absolutely an “L” and not something you should do. But when it comes to bigger pieces or work you wish to cycle into the cultural eye through wider circles, explore the ways in which expressing it in another format can introduce it to a new audience and enrich the connections you already have.

08 Host an event or talk

As we build out a Release Window, one of the surest tools at our disposal for generating organic attention is an event. An in-person gathering can serve as an opportunity to go deeper into our work, to bring together a community of people around it, and to introduce our work to new audiences.

A couple of examples from the Metalabel universe: multiple labels have hosted release parties to celebrate their work. These have happened the week before the release, the week of the release, and after the release.

We’re especially a fan of hosting an event both the week of the release and a ways afterwards. In the case of “The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet,” the collective held a virtual roundtable for collectors, six weeks after the release. This served as an anchor point for collectors to anticipate, as well as a new excuse to talk about the work during and after the event itself.

09 Get interviewed about it

Obvious but not to be underestimated: getting interviewed or written about by somebody else. For most of us, this is a key step to finding our path to being seen and to finding our voice. It’s also a part of the process of legitimizing us in the eyes of others.

As we’ve said before this is not the reason to do things — it’s a slippery slope to bad vibes — but it is a key amplification point that legitimizes you to a new audience.

We can write a whole separate post on how we communicate our work, but for now just know that other people talking about you and having you on is one of the best ways to introduce you to a new audience. Do not underrate.

It makes a huge difference when multiple contributors are committed to a plan for promoting a release.

This works best when there’s a common understanding among the group of timelines, when people are meant to start posting, what you’re going to say, and even things that you’ll do together physically or online to celebrate and bring attention to the release.

This isn’t easy. To do this well, you need a central group coordinator who has the energy and organization to get people to pay attention and follow through. Everyone will have their own things going on, so plan ahead and use the communication channels that are most effective to be in touch with the group.

In our experience, direct messages, texts, and emails work much better than group messages when it comes to getting commitments and making decisions. Use group threads to share information, but to get anything done go direct.

11 Scenes

Related to promoting with others is to be part of or connect with the wider scene of people who make work like you.

In the past decade of the Creator Economy we’ve tended to view people who make work like us as frenemies more than potential peers. But traditionally when people build relationships and release work in shared contexts, there’s a positive- sum tide that lifts everyone up.

Scenes can have a negative connotation — exclusivity, people judging each other — but when we see that we can all create scenes around whatever we want, they take on a much more abundant and supportive tone. This is how we think of scenes — not as exclusive so much as specific and infinite.

This is something the internet does really well. Where scenes are most meaningful, however, is when it’s with people in physical proximity. The feeling and sensation of intermingling, sharing ideas, building and responding to each other not as brains or instruments but as people, is one of the great rewards in life.

12 Make the next thing

In the closing pages of Virgil Abloh’s life retrospective Figures of Speech he writes: “Upon creating this dense book of work, I have realized one thing at the end: it’s all worth nothing compared to the freedom to express the next idea.”

This is the most important principle of all. It’s always about the next thing. That’s the real beauty and joy of being a creative person.

This is how we have to think as creative people: we’re always moving forward. We’re always inviting our brains and our hands and our bodies and whatever we use to keep exploring and experimenting. We’re always hungry to explore.

We do this not out of careerist goals. We do this not out of a desire to win a status game. We do it because it’s what’s in us. It’s what’s fun. Natural. The thing we most love to do.

This is the reason for the first principle — do it for yourself — and its corresponding encouragement to not give a f#!k. By grounding ourselves in our voice, our drive, and the freedom to create, we liberate ourselves from the emotional swings of the creative life and keep us focused on the true joy: producing work.

This is the pocket to stay in. This is where our inner selves are freed to connect to the Source and channel the voices of the gods. This is the reason why we’re here. Stay true to it.